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What’s the Real Cost of a Missed Call?

Every successful business owner understands the importance of answering telephone enquiries promptly but do you know the real cost of a missed call? Just how much money is it costing your business, every time the phone goes unanswered? In this article, we are going to delve deeply in order to find the answer to this question. You already know that a missed call could cost you a sale but we are going to come up with some hard figures that will help you to calculate a monetary sum that you can place on each caller who hangs up before their call is answered.

Missed Calls Mean Missed Opportunities

Whether it was a new enquiry from a potential customer or a follow-up call from an existing client who wanted to place another order, the call that you just failed to pick up could affect your bottom line. It is not possible to say with any certainty just how much money any particular missed call will cost your firm but we can show you some figures that are sure to frighten you if unanswered calls are a regular occurrence in your office.

Roughly 85% of people whose calls are not answered will not call back – This is a hugely important figure that should ring alarm bells for any company that cannot cope with the volume of calls it receives at certain times of the day. If the callers are potential customers who were ready to place an order, the cost to your firm could be extremely high.

Approximately 75% of people will not leave a message – Some companies believe that voicemail is an adequate solution when all the lines are busy but the fact that fully three quarters of callers will not leave a message when left to talk to a machine should be enough to convince you otherwise. Calls that are answered by a professional receptionist rather than a machine almost always end well for both parties, as long as the calls are returned within a reasonable timeframe.

80% of all business communications take place over the phone – In this digital age you might have assumed that emails or perhaps even social media messages had already overtaken the phone but in actual fact, around 80% of the enquiries that your business receives are still likely to be in the form of telephone calls. With so much resting on your ability to answer telephone calls in a timely manner, failing to do so is not an option that should be seriously entertained.

More than 60% of unhappy clients will take their business elsewhere – Around 70% of people will stop dealing with a firm whose customer service is not up to scratch and more than 60% will go on to do business with a rival company. Unless you are running a physical retail outlet, the vast majority of your customer service functionality will involve the making and receiving of telephone calls. It is for this reason that you need to ensure no calls are left unanswered.

Your employees could be spending around 8% of their time at work dealing with complaints that arise because of a failure to answer calls promptly. When people cannot reach the companies that they have chosen to favour with their custom, they almost always react negatively. In the highly competitive business world that most firms operate, the reasons for such complaints need to be dealt with at source. Quite apart from the man hours that your firm is losing by having to deal with these complaints, the loss of business and reputation that it sustains could have extremely serious consequences.

Over 80% of people in the United Kingdom are not willing to trust overseas call centres with their personal information. This means that using the services of such a centre to ensure your calls are answered promptly could cost your company almost as much business as if the calls were left unanswered. When dealing with professional answering services in their own country, the reaction is far more positive. Almost all callers are quite happy to leave a message if they believe the information they give will be kept safe.

People will tell 1.6 times as many people about bad customer service than good customer service. To put it in more simple terms: impress a customer with first-class customer service and they may tell 10-15 of their friends about your company. On the other hand, bad customer service such as failing to answer calls in a timely manner is something about which they may tell 16-24 of their friends. Bad news spreads faster and further than good news so you need to ensure that all news about your company is positive.

It is estimated that businesses in the United Kingdom lose over £30 billion every single year due to missed calls. This is a massive figure and illustrates very clearly the money that is being left on the table every time that you fail to answer a telephone call.

What is the Best Solution?

The most cost effective solution, as far as the vast majority of businesses in the UK are concerned, is to form a partnership with a firm that offers professional telephone answering services. By doing so, you can make sure that you only have to pay for the calls that are answered by your service provider rather than having to hire full-time employees who may sit idle for much of the working week. Companies that use locally based call handling services report as much as a 50% increase in productivity, a figure which dwarfs the actual cost of such services in terms of significance to annual profits.

If you would like to find out just how much difference a professional telephone answering service could make to your company’s annual turnover and profits, Message Direct offers a range of competitively priced call handling services. Call today to discuss your options: we promise your call will not go unanswered!